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1.4 Advantages of A DBMS

Application programs should be as independent as possible from details of data representation and storage.

The DBMS can provide an abstract view

Efficient data access:

A DBMS utilizes a variety of sophisticated techniques to store and retrieve data efficiently. This feature is important for external storage devices.

Data integrity and security:

If data is always accessed through DBMS, it can enforce integrity constraints on data.

DBMS can enforce access controls that govern what data is visible to different users.

Data administration:

When several users share the data, centralizing the administration of data can offer significant improvements. Experienced professionals can be responsible for organizing the data representation to minimize redundancy and for fine-tuning the storage of the data to make retrieval efficient.

Concurrent access and crash recovery:

A DBMS schedules concurrent accesses to the data in such a manner that users can think of the data as being accessed by only one user at a time.

The DBMS protects users from the effects of system failures.

Reduced application development time:

The DBMS supports many important functions that are common to many applications accessing data stored in the DBMS. => facilitates quick development of applications.

Such applications are likely to be more robust than applications developed from scratch.

Drawback of DBMS:

DBMS is a complex piece of software, optimized for certain kinds of workload, and its performance may not be adequate for certain specialized applications!

Examples:

applications with tight real-time constraints

applications with just a few well-defined critical operations for which efficient custom code must be written

applications that may need to manipulate the data in ways not supported by the query language

In this situation, the abstract view of the data presented by the DBMS does not match the application’s needs and actually gets in the way.